HE
(Rajendra Garg)


Last evening
Strolling along the river bank
He quoted Bhartrihari
And likened life to a bubble
Then in a café we sipped tea.
This morning on our shoulders
We have brought him here.

He often felt dyspeptic
Arthritis plagued his joints
Persistent cough spoiled
The rhythm of his morning recitations
Amid vague fears he taught in the class
“Stand up O Arjuna, shed fears
Fight and conquer the world.”

Son’s stupidities
Daughter’s contempt of good repute
Wife’s obstinacies
Leaking roof and bleeding haemorrhoids
Gave him no moment of respite
But who could sit unmoved
When he dwelt upon
The rise and fall of empires
The rebellions and massacres
In Delhi and Chittor
And the Freudian world of dreams.

In recent years he often grumbled
For none agreed to marry
A poor man’s daughter
Living in a house
Where ceilings leaked.





MY NEW DINING TABLE

My gorge rises
Nauseous is the dinner
When I sit at my new dining table.
The tree still peers through its synthetic veneer
And all its shiny gloss
Oh, such a disconcerting gaze of the tree
It upsets everything in me.

Since my grandpa brought a sapling home
Proudly it had stood at our mansion gate
Last month I felled it
And the joiner framed the table
Whenever it finds me alone
The table mumbles, ‘ Et tu child ’,
Yes the tree murmurs the prayer-
‘Forgive him my Lord for he does not know’

From the table rises the rumble of three generations
Their hopes and illusions and gossips
Their heartbreaks and fears and pains
All whispered to this tree
Deep into the table I see my mother
Bowing in solemn worship to this patriarch
And hear my father’s holy recitations.

What itched me to wield the axe?
What egged me on to cut your throat?

My gorge rises
When I sit at my new dining table.






CLOD OF CLAY

Spins the potter’s wheel
Clod of clay I reel
I’m clapped and slapped
And thumbed and thumped
What blows his fingers deal

It’s a game of hide and seek
I laugh I cry I creak
I’m yoked and knocked
And rocked and poked
As carrion in vulture’s beak

They say I steer my way
I plan and determine my day
It’s right I fight
With might and insight
Things happen come what may





MY METAPHYSICS

Long summer days
Scorching sizzling sun
Every leaf singed
Sweating and gasping I muse:-

Chaos will overtake harmony
What has been tuned will be untuned
Being will be devoured by non-being
For death rules supreme
And life covers in fear
The pageant will fall apart
Things will unweave themselves
Strife pollution epidemics….

In a tiny crack of an ancient wall
In the fissure of a brick
There it was
Sticking its neck out
Smiling at me mischievously
A fresh green infant shoot
A microscopic sprout
And my metaphysics ran out.



A CHANGE IS DUE

Though with every passing day
My house grows friendlier to me
I am going to demolish
This old familiar structure
And have a new one built
On a different plinth
With walls of different hue
Doors and windows new
Letting the sun and the moon
From new angles peep
So that in every room
New shadows leap

Oh how I long to see
The hills and trees and riverbanks
Behind and beyond these walls

The old house gives me a view
But I feel a change is due




MY GRANNY

Even a draught of air tickled her
For laughter and joy
Brimmed over her being and oozed
Dance of a bear or a monkey’s antics
Or the street magician’s game
Into wild ecstasies threw her
Her plump sanguine shape
So often convulsed with guffaws
Never in low spirits no phlegm
Always in gusto always aflame
In grief untamed as in joy
For weeks for months
She wept and fainted and beat her breast
When her son’s boy was brought home
Never lukewarm never sedate
Passion throbbed her heart
It’s the month of ashwin
A shraddha for her we observe
Nine Brahamins dine in my house
In my gloomy attic I sit
Drowned in morbid thoughts
Dull dampened depressed
Breathing away a sapless life
Nursing old anxieties
Filled with a hundred apprehensions
Muttering prayers in fear
Ignored alone stranded
An unworthy heir




COLLEGE CORRIDORS

Dark dreary and damp
Exuding a melancholy academic smell
These grim corridor walls of my college
Dumb witnesses to a long era
Sucking and absorbing the humming and buzzing
Of the vivacious young boys
Their guffaws, their gossips,
Their scandals, their hilarity,
Their violent quarrels, and heartburns,
Their rivalries, their pangs of jealousy,
Their thrills of winning
Their pains of losing a prize

Day after day these corridors echo
The giggles and whispers of comely girls
Coy or vociferous but always coquettish
With bewitching smiles (or frowns as the case may be)
As they pass through these college corridors
Effusing the primeval female smell
And disturbing the elemental equilibrium.

How often these corridor walls are filled with nausea
Hearing the tremulous husky tone
Of old phlegmatic professors
With senility and paranoid schizophrenia
Perched on their stooping shoulders
With sighs of regrets and old frustrations
Their choleric tongues pour out vitriol.

All these voices lay frozen and asleep
Between the bricks of these corridor walls.



MY GRANDFATHER

The castle–capped hill
Brooding alone, nonchalant
Lost in reverie
Looks like my grandfather
When for hours in his bed
Motionless he sat
Eyes half closed ears unhearing
He gazed into a dim hazy world
Where voices were only sounds.

Now I am sure he saw
With hoary eyes he saw
Glimpses remote –
The ball hurtling in the air
Which he or his cronies kicked
The rivers he swam across
The faces of his grandparents
The proud Peepul tree
At the door of his ancestral hut
And…and a face that refused to grow old
When the world around him
Decayed and died everyday.

His deaf ears heard the distant rumble-
His grandpa chanting morning hymns
The rhythmic rattle that rose
When his mother
Washed and milled and swept and milked
And sang lullaby to his ears
And…and he heard an endearing call.





THE WORLD IS A BOOK


They say the world is a book
Endless are the contents
Chapters follow Chapters
Brimming full of lessons and comments

For years and years and years
The script was illegible and pale
No meaning could I decipher
Nor make any head or tail

When my blood calmed down
And wrinkles etched on the face
One by one my cronies vanished
I began a meaning to trace

Now at seventy and sans eye
I can read the book crystal clear
My legs tremble and tongue mumbles words
Fingers paralysed and limbs out of gear






THE INEXORABLE

The city devours my village
The predator and the prey
Both co-operate

For inside the jaws of a lizard
The moth forgets not
The ground realities
And sits stoically
Where fate has brought it

My village
In its ancient wisdom
Knows the inexorable

Only the dumb nightingale
In the din of demonic machines
Looks askance




DEEDS ARE DEEDS

Flames flutter and leap
His kinsmen peep his children weep
The harvest we reap

Faggots burn his greed
Burn his needs and burn his creeds
But Deeds are deeds

Poke the skull, unlock
The ghost, in one stroke it’s off the yoke
It was a dream a joke

Ash and blackened bone
The Brahmin’s drone in husky tone
Now leave him alone

He yearned to earn
Spurned his leisure and churned his books to learn
A brief sojourn

He strove for name and fame
But life is a wilful dame none can tame
None to blame in a game




POSTMAN

You carry
My street Atlas
The world on your shoulder

The world of tears
Guffaws hopes
Broken promises disillusionments
And what not

Nonchalant you handover
Or slip into the slit
Or throw inside the gate
What you thoughtlessly pick out
From the bag strapped on your shoulder
The recipient is no chooser
How unconcernedly
You dole out sighs and smiles

From the chaos in your bag
The elements spring up
And take form

What ‘moving finger’ writes
Things so inexorable
With what matter-of-factness
You deal out
Tears and laughter



MY METAPHYSICS

Long summer days
Scorching sizzling sun
Every leaf singed
Sweating and gasping I muse-

Chaos will overtake harmony
What has been tuned will be untuned
Being will be devoured by non-being
For death rules supreme
And life cowers in fear
The pageant will fall apart
Things will unweave themselves
Strife pollution epidemics ------


In a tiny crack of an ancient wall
In the fissure of a brick
There it was
Sticking its neck out
Smiling at me mischievously
A fresh green infant shoot
A microscopic sprout
And my metaphysics ran out



Rajendra Garg
54/8, Mansarovar, Jaipur 302020
PH.-0141-2785170

MY POEMS